Bayer has more than 100,000 employees worldwide, operates out of 83 countries and is one of the largest life sciences and pharmaceutical companies in the world. The company is on a mission to change its employee engagement, by standardizing the ServiceNow Now platform, believing it will lead to better results for its customers.
Jan Toennissen, Head of Digital Technologies at Bayer, was speaking at ServiceNow’s recent Knowledge event in The Hague, where he explained that the company is firmly focused on intelligent automation to streamline its corporate functions – all from HR, to accounting and procurement.
Bayer’s experience in investing in research and development to deliver results for customers is reflected in its belief that investing in its digital core will benefit employees. Toennissen said having a ‘digital business’ means having a ‘digital core’ – in which ServiceNow plays a critical role. Toennissen added:
We started the journey, I would say, from the point of excellence to the beginning of the pandemic, where it was all about being as efficient as possible. Then we look at most intelligent automation, everything from RPA to machine learning applications, to digitalizing and modifying processes.
What we’ve thought of so far is when you have it digital, and as much as possible automatically, that’s where it becomes transformational. Because then you start to think about: who is actually using this process? Why doesn’t it reflect well on employees? Why doesn’t it reflect suppliers? Then the discussion changes.
With this in mind, Bayer is now focusing on its own internal processes and redesigning them for enabling automation, with the goal of strengthening employee engagement. The corporate functions of the company are at the heart of it, as they are the main touchpoints for the employees. It is redesigning processes within key areas of this company to drive some results. Toennissen said:
There is still a focus on efficiencies, particularly when we talk about corporate functions. Because as a corporate function you want to have the footprint as small as possible, but the impact as large as possible. But at the same time, the new thing that comes in is the piece of experience.
This is something that goes through all the functions. And this whole pandemic, of course, increases the importance of creating an environment where people still feel like they’re working for Bayer, not just working somewhere in their living room, connected to what could be any company on the other side of their laptop.
Our first insight into what we wanted to create was a service management experience, where on the delivery side it was as effortless as possible, but on the consumer side it was a total experience. That’s where we now laid the foundation of this journey with ServiceNow.
Serves all 100,000 employees
Toennissen said Bayer believes it can still target efficiencies while delivering great experiences – “you save on costs, but still empower people to do things”. This philosophy drives significant buy-in from all areas, including senior management, the functions themselves, as well as employees.
Bayer started with IT service management, ServiceNow’s traditional core offering, but has already begun implementing the platform for HR, finance and procurement. By the end of 2023, it aims to have the platform reach all of Bayer’s 100,000 employees as well as 80% of the agents working in its shared service centers, delivering services across its core functions.
Toennissen said:
The main takeaway is to choose the right platform. It took quite a while, probably eight to twelve months, to choose the platform for this journey. Ultimately, we settled for ServiceNow, obviously.
For us, it’s very important to think about how you’re going to unlock your investments, because there’s always a bit of an initial investment, not just in licensing, but to drive up the project team and internal resources.
So we tried to shorten the delivery time as much as possible. Last week we had a bit of a celebration as we made the first release after six weeks for HR and finance. And the next release is in another six weeks, so we have a very short, agile time cycle.
A Center of Excellence
Toennissen said what he and his team didn’t expect was the longing from the organization to improve the employee experience. Acceleration in uptake prompted Bayer to create a Center of Excellence (CoE) to guide implementations. He explained:
I thought I had to go door to door to shake hands to get the next use case. But once we started talking about the success of the implementations, the pipeline filled up faster than we thought.
Now we are trying to track and prioritize all the elements in the pipeline. We are now setting up the CoE above to manage demand and make sure from an investment point of view, we get the maximum value first. We try to bring people to understand these topics.
And Toennissen urged other organizations going through a similar adoption process to build the CoE sooner. He said:
My advice is to start early with the Center of Excellence, as that gives you the mandate to lead some of the discussions and make the necessary compromises that will ultimately bring value that the employee feels. I think that’s one piece that we kind of caught up with.
Toennissen also warned that employees are eager to discuss their experiences, sometimes detrimental to the project. To manage this, keep the focus on best practice principles. He added:
Another part is that we greatly underestimate the excitement of the function to discuss the employee experience, up and down, and ten times. We’re more trying to push them toward best practices, rather than having a monthly open discussion of what might be the best positioning of a button on a page.
You need to have that discussion early in the project, or before you start your project implementation. But to also have clear performance requirements in terms of user stores. What do you really want to get out of it and how do you map your user stories to your value story? That was a difficult piece.
Redesign processes for experience
The main point Toennissen made was that while the ServiceNow platform is the enabler in Bayer’s innovation efforts, it doesn’t mean the responsibility still lies with the company to do things differently. He said:
What we thought was that just having the platform wasn’t the value. The value is in the design of the services you bring and the design, you still have to do yourself. So you have to think about: where are my employees? What kind of personality do I have? How did they reach the platform? What do they prefer? What service can I bring to them digitally?
And ultimately, Bayer is confident that the employee and customer experience are inextricably linked. He added:
We follow this philosophy that if you are a happy employee, you will have a happy customer eventually. What we focus more on are employee engagement evaluations. Just four weeks ago we did our last employee voice survey.
And what we’re really trying to improve is this relationship between the employee and the company, which ServiceNow plays a big role in. Because most of the touch points that happen throughout the day are it’s interaction functions. We try to map out these moments that matter.
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